


Learning the steps

by yesfir



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Child Abuse, Childhood Trauma, Choking, Found Family, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Meteorstuck, One-Sided Dave Strider/John Egbert - Freeform, Panic Attacks, Suicide Attempt, a serious discussion of troll romcoms, and also actual family, and also his sexuality, dave grappling with his shitty childhood, not the kinky kind the traumatic kind, strider business as usual, strilondes talk a lot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-24
Updated: 2020-04-30
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:46:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 17,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23815597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yesfir/pseuds/yesfir
Summary: "Other actual human beings, but as distant to you as if they too were citizens of some far away planet, as real as characters in movies. You’d never really dared speak to them besides whatever perfunctory interactions were necessary to facilitate the purchase of a fuckton of frozen burritos and bags of chips. You’d never gone to school, never had a babysitter, never so much as played with some random asshole kids in the park. You’d known without asking that your Bro would never have tolerated that. So for the longest time, no one else really existed in your world."While belatedly learning how to interact with people in real life, Dave experiences a lot of firsts, and the world changes. Or maybe he does.
Relationships: Dave Strider/Karkat Vantas, Dave's Bro | Beta Dirk Strider & Dave Strider, Jade Harley & Dave Strider, John Egbert & Dave Strider, Rose Lalonde & Dave Strider
Comments: 11
Kudos: 130





	1. Dance

**Author's Note:**

> Tossing up the first three chapters now, will finish the fourth in a day or two. This was supposed to be a very short little ficlet, and now it's over 10000 words and still isn't done. But it IS almost finished, and then I can go back to finishing the upcoming chapter for a longer fic. Weeeeeee.

_“But she says: ‘No, don't you see we have wings?_

_It's the funniest thing,_

_it's just that no one knows.’”_

It’s a strange experience because you don’t actually wake up, you just become aware of what’s always been there. That feeling of never being entirely present, the music in your head that never stops, that strange sense of an unfolding narrative in everything you do; it all resolved into one certainty with such ease that it suddenly seems impossible that you didn’t know. Part of you has always been somewhere else, waiting for your awareness to catch up with it.  
  
As one body falls asleep and your mind for the first time makes its journey into your dream world without passing through any transitional stages of drowsiness and fitful slumber, it has a kind of Rubin’s vase effect on you. Suddenly, the other picture has always been there, subtly woven into your every waking moment, but so much clearer once the trick has been revealed. You look down at your hands on the red keyboard and think oh, this place. You know it well. In some ways which you’re not ready to name yet, it has haunted you.  
  
You don’t even have time to come to terms with this revelation, however, because you instinctively know you’re not alone. To break this kind of illusion, you need to introduce a new factor, change the perspective... flip it turnways, as it were.  
  
So you turn towards the window, and Rose is there. You know it’s her, of course. You’ve seen pictures-

  
  
_(TG: rose_ _  
_ _TG: hey rose_ _  
_ _TG: you should send me a picture so i can confirm that youre definitely a creepy 45 yo man_ _  
_ _TG: i mean not that it matters our last conversation definitely made that clear_ _  
_ _TG: at this point it would honestly be more embarrassing for you if you werent_ _  
_ _TG: but do it anyway_ _  
_ _TG: oh and wear something sexy_ _  
  
_ _It takes her almost 24 whole hours to reply. Then she sends you a picture of herself in a heavy raincoat and a cartoonishly big rain hat, both bright yellow. The background is a grey blur, her fair hair is plastered to her face, and she’s obviously dripping wet. She stares unsmiling at the camera, so disinterested that it’s clear that she’s making an effort. Despite the seemingly unflattering circumstances, you notice that she’s extremely meticulously made up, especially for another ten-year-old. She must’ve known you’d notice. She must’ve done that on purpose._ _  
  
_ _It takes you even longer to respond, because you have to first rig the camera so you can take the photo remotely, then develop the film, then take another digital picture of the resulting photograph before you can finally_ _send_ _it to her. The result is a slightly blurry image of your own vague form under an impenetrable cover of smuppets, where all that’s visible is your shades and the tip of your nose._ _  
  
_ _TT: As much as I appreciate the candid nature of the photo, as well as the positively titillating implications concerning whatever monstrous complexes lurk within_ _that_ _troubled psyche_ _of yours_ _which it so elegantly communicates..._ _  
_ _TT: I am not sure that we’ve reached the point where I feel comfortable involving puppets in our courtship._ _  
_ _TT: I am trying to be respectful; I understand that puppets are deeply meaningful in your esoteric manbro culture. I just don’t think we’re quite there yet,_ _relationship-wise_ _._ _  
_ _TT: Not to mention, I can’t even see your face, Dave._ _  
_ _TT: Consider me disappointed._ _  
  
_ _You retaliate with a positive hailstorm of more and more self-aware ironic selfies, until taking them accidentally becomes a new hobby of yours.)_

  
  
-and even if you hadn’t, who else would it be? Dressed up in the same kind of luxurious purple pajama as you, offering you a casual little wave as if she’s not hovering right above a pretty impressive sheer drop. Now she’s got your attention, she slips over the windowsill and floats gracefully over your turntables, before she easing herself onto the floor. Her soft pink slippers hardly make a sound.

Suddenly, all realizations pertaining to this room and how you’ve spent your whole life dreaming about it have to take a backseat to the reality of her presence. The thing is, it’s not like you haven’t had plenty of other people around you before, including kids your age. You do go outside from time to time, after all. Whenever you manage to come across some money that your Bro has left lying around – and you can never really tell if it’s by a rare instance of him forgetting to stash it away, or a just as rare instance of him remembering to leave it there for you. But when you do, you’ve made a habit of leaving the apartment to go grab as much shit as you can afford, mainly whatever kinds of food will last until the next time you find some money, to stash in random places in the apartment and hope for the best. Most of the time he only swipes that stuff if you’ve done poorly during sparring, as a punishment – or at least that’s what you assume his rationale is. Not like you can really tell. Not like he tells you.

So sure, you’re used to having people around. But the thing about all those people, the ones passing you on the streets of Houston on their way somewhere else, or hanging around outside restaurants or in parks or in malls, is that they’re all strangers. _Were_ all strangers. You suppose they’re dead now, and you can’t even really bring yourself to feel something about it. You try to imagine some vaguely remembered faces, of a lady who smiled at you as she handed you your shopping bags and asked if you were going to have a party, or some guy who lounged on the bike racks outside your building and watched you walk down the street, seeming to briefly nod his head in approval, or maybe just in time with the music in his headphones. Other actual human beings, but as distant to you as if they too were citizens of some far away planet, as real as characters in movies. You’d never really dared speak to them besides whatever perfunctory interactions were necessary to facilitate the purchase of a fuckton of frozen burritos and bags of chips. You’d never gone to school, never had a babysitter, never so much as played with some random asshole kids in the park. You’d known without asking that your Bro would never have tolerated that. So for the longest time, no one else really existed in your world.

As sad as it sounds, when Jade contacted you that first time, it was the first actual interaction you’d had with someone your own age. Your three internet friends, as dorky and hopeless as they are, are the only friends you have in the world. And here’s one of them, actually standing right in front of you. Nevermind that it’s a dream, you know enough now to understand that this doesn’t actually make it less real. Rose is right there, her big lilac eyes looking around your dream room with interest, taking in the myriad birds, glowing wall art and unspeakable jumble of shit crowded into the rather small space. One eyebrow shoots up, a carefully calculated gesture, or perhaps you should say challenge.

“Nice,” she remarks, a little bit dryly but not entirely insincerely. At least that’s what you think. This shit is so much easier to decipher in text, where you’re confident in your ability to parse her walls of text and convoluted sentences to find out what she really means. In person, using actual words to each other, the whole thing gets a lot more confusing. There are facial expressions and tones and context to contend with, and who the fuck knows what to do with either of those things? Not a guy who’s grown up with an inscrutable irony ninja as his only human company, that’s for damn sure.

Fuck, you don’t know what to say. If you don’t do something soon, she’s going to think that you’re so lame. But what?

You shrug as if you don’t have an opinion one way or another, but your dream room is in fact totally sweet and you’re happy she thinks so too. You walk past her, feeling like maybe the best way to solve this is to show her more of how awesome this place is, and hopefully that’ll convince her that hanging out here with you is really cool. Yeah.

You keep your gaze fixed on your own hands as you turn on one of your very illest jams, and you feel a small thrill at the thought of being able to share it with her right here and now, in person. The novelty is both terrifying and exhilarating. Well, that is, not that you don’t sort of share your music with Bro too, in a manner of speaking. He must hear it when you play and he’s home, and sometimes you can tell he’s been in your room and messed around with your stuff. You have this vague sense that he approves, that maybe he thinks your shit is in fact pretty fucking tight; that it’s one of the few things the two of you can manage to share that doesn’t involve you getting bruises and cuts all over your body. But it’s not like he’d every actually _say_ something about it, or even do anything other than offer vague gestures of some sort of indecipherable camaraderie. You have to admit that sending the files over to Jade has always been a lot more gratifying, even though she’s far away on Hellmurder Island and you can’t actually listen to the same music together. Not for real.

When you look up, Rose is watching you with her head slightly cocked to the side, her lips moving slightly into something that’s not quite a smile, but close. You’re honestly not sure what kind of reaction you’d expected, maybe some vaguely ironic comment about breaking out the ill jams on a first date, as if that pretend pseudo-flirting wasn’t embarrassing enough when you can’t see each other’s faces. You don’t know what you’re looking for even, she’s not like Jade, so enthusiasm is probably a bit much to hope for, but maybe… maybe something you haven’t had before. Maybe something you’re awkwardly aware that you’re absolutely desperate for. You think maybe you’ll know it when you see it.

Whatever you’d expected, it wasn’t the way she suddenly arranges her feet heel-to-heel at a 90 degree angle, holding out her arms loosely in front of her. As she begins to move, first sliding one foot out, then overlapping her legs, every little change accompanied by a different arm stance, it dawns on you that you recognize the pattern. That’s… ballet, isn’t it? Fuck knows you don’t know shit about ballet, but at the very least you know what it _looks_ like. You realize that you’re nodding your head to the beat as Rose starts getting advanced with that shit, getting up on her toes and twirling in place, her leg shooting out and pivoting her around, somehow managing not to smack it right into the fucking toilet that now sits bang in the center of the room. Then she suddenly laughs, her arms flying out, her movements no longer so polished as the beat starts picking up, and you realize that without noticing it, you’re almost smiling too. As she grabs your hand and pulls at it, you don’t even hesitate.

For the first time in your life, you dance.

You can’t imagine that you’re very good at it. There are definitely moments where you’re not sure how to move your body next, and you end up bumping against Rose a couple of times. But it’s a little like the flow of martial arts really, and as you incorporate those stances and the rhythm of them into your movements, you find that it starts flowing more easily. And the best part, anyway, is that you don’t care. You don’t care if you look stupid, if you’re doing it wrong. Rose is smiling hugely and you can tell that she doesn’t either, that she has dropped some of that impeccable poise in favor of the sheer joy of dancing. She looks younger, you think. Younger than she did even in the first picture you ever saw of her, younger than the image you’ve built of her in your mind, created from her meticulous flow of words and iron control on how she presents herself. You wonder if that’s how you look too, bouncing around in a cloud of excited birds that shed feathers everywhere. If you both look like the children neither of you have ever really felt like, dancing in a cluttered room far away from endless rainy forests, far away from hidden cameras, far away from the smell of alcohol, far away from beatings, far away from wizards, far away from p-

You whip around, suddenly overcome with ice-cold awareness of your constant watcher even in this place, only to find Rose holding Cal. She has him by the front of his clothes, dangling him there as if he’s something distasteful that she doesn’t want to touch, an impression that is only amplified by the look on her face. Without even looking at you, or in any other way waiting for confirmation, she twirls over to the window. Her hair frames her face like a ghostly halo as she spins, so fast that she almost blurs, and she with impressive precision lets go of the puppet at the exact right moment to send him flying in an arc against the inky black void surrounding Derse. In a split second, he has dropped out of sight. You half open your mouth, not sure whether to protest or to thank her, then press it shut again. You say nothing. Rose smiles at you, reaches out, and cranks up the volume.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> quote from “josephine” by teitur


	2. Hug, Kiss

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> EDIT, TRIGGER WARNING: i wrote this chapter before the very recent death of George Floyd, or i obviously would have written things a bit differently. as it is, i want to warn readers that this chapter contains a description of dave being choked in a way which some readers may find triggering in light of the murder, which has caused a great deal of trauma to many people.
> 
> the part in question is the italicized flashback, and can be easily skipped. i’m adding a brief summary in the end note after the chapter. i apologize if i’ve caused anyone distress since i didn’t remember to warn for it before this point.
> 
> BLACK LIVES MATTER. donate to one of the freedom funds, Reclaim The Block, or Black Visions Collective if you can.

_“So goodbye for a while_

_I'm out to learn more_

_About who I really was before”_

You don’t even have time to finish your suitably laid-back greeting - “hey” - before you suddenly have your arms full of Jade. Her arms are strong, and as she pulls them close around your body you swear can hear your spine pop. She’s laughing delightedly, her voice just a touch deeper than you expected it to be, but every bit as warm and bright. Her hair is in your face, god, there’s so _much_ of it, growing every which way in unruly coils and thick spirals and honest to god thickets of the stuff, just like you suppose you’d expect from someone living alone on an island who haphazardly cuts her own hair whenever she feels like it. Using the same scissors that she uses to trim the dog too.

It’s your first hug. You’ve never been hugged before.

You couldn’t say for certain what you feel about it even if you were inclined to try, and you really aren’t. How the fuck do you feel the absence of something you’ve never even experienced before? How does that work? Is there something built into every human that just tells you that hugs are nice and it sure would be great if you could have them every once in a while? It’s not like going without food or water or sleep, you know that. When you’re without shit like that, you _know_ something is wrong, and sheer instinct will force you to seek out anything that’ll alleviate that feeling. But it’s not until Jade’s body slammed into yours so hard that you almost had the breath knocked from your lungs, not until she giggled and wobbled with you, not until she squeezed even tighter and actually managed to lift you half an inch off the ground… it’s not until then that you realize that somehow, you’ve always wanted this.

It doesn’t make sense, but you’re never been more certain about anything. On all those nights when you just couldn’t sleep, when you’d pull your blanket tighter and tighter around yourself in spite of the sweltering heat, this is what you wanted. When you sat on the edge of the roof and watched people scurry far below, when you lay around for hours zapping restlessly between TV stations, when you hit the hard concrete and felt the skin on your hands shredding as you slid, this was the source of the bottomless exhaustion that slowly drained the color out of the world.

Babies need to be held though, right? Even weird ecto-babies that presumably aren’t actually brought into existence as newly born infants, and therefore are slightly more mobile than your average stranded jellyfish. You still need to pick them up and haul them around, change them, bathe them, hold them still while you feed them, that kind of shit. You have to carry them with you because you can’t just leave them unsupervised. So at some point in time, Bro must have have held you at least once. It’s physically impossible that you ever made it past that age without that happening, right? But try as hard as you might, you just can’t imagine it. Those big, callused hands have grabbed you and yanked you off-balance, they have knuckled you in the solar plexus, they’ve supplexed you, they’ve held you down and twisted your arm up, always to the edge of unbearable pain but never hard enough to actually break anything. Occasionally, they’ve bumped briefly against your fist, or slapped your back once, and that’s as close to gentle as they ever get. You can’t imagine those hands cradling a baby version of you, washing shampoo out of your hair in the kitchen sink, patting your back to make you burp, jogging you awkwardly up and down at three in the morning in the hopes that you’ll finally fall asleep. All of that must’ve happened, but you can’t make yourself see it in your mind, and you were far too young to remember.

Why can’t you remember?

Would everything else have been better or worse, if you’d been able to remember?

There’s an uncomfortable tightness in your chest that has nothing to do with Jade clinging to you, making it hard to breathe, making you squeeze your eyes shut hard behind your shades as you try to keep the void from spilling out of you. You don’t want to think about this. You’re fine, aren’t you? It’s not really that weird, you just had a different kind of family than most, but still a totally cool one. Not everyone can grow up coddled practically to death like John, right? Some people are just hard dudes who try to become stronger together. Hugs don’t really fit into that picture. It doesn’t have to be a big deal.

Don’t cry, you intone severely to yourself. Don’t cry. Crying doesn’t help. You know that. Crying only makes shit worse.

Jade is crying, sobs mingling with her laughter, soaking into the front of your shirt. She finally has to let go of you when the sobs turn into a really bad case of the hiccups, and though you wish she wouldn’t, you don’t say anything about it. She’s a bit messy now, some strands of her hair glued to her wet cheeks, and her nose is running a little bit. You pretend not to notice as she turns away and tries to quickly wipe her face clean with a corner of her dress, instead glancing around at her already significantly less snow-covered planet. You can hear a soft sizzling sound which it takes you a moment to identify as water dripping off the branches all around you.But there’s a lot of snow to melt, and most of the ground is still covered. It’s going to be some hours, linearly speaking, before there are only patches of it left on the ground. Longer for you, of course, since you intend to make good use of the time you have left alive on this planet, and that’s going to involve exploiting as many stable time loops as you possibly can.

“Okay, at least it’s warmer. Soggy and hazy, sure, and my shirt is already gluing itself to my moist torso in the best kind of way, but at least I’m not gonna take anyone’s eye out with the stiff peaks of my nipples.”

“Dave, don’t be weird.” The crying has gotten to her voice too, edging it with a bit of roughness, but she also sounds like she’s trying hard not to laugh, shoving a swathe of her hair in behind her ear as she beams at you. Even in the aftermath of her emotions, tears clinging to her lashes, the vibrancy of her expression and the brightness of her green eyes make her sort of… pretty? Hell, you’re not exactly an expert. The dress she’s wearing twinkles like stars and has this subtle green iridescence about it, and though you think the way it drags behind her on the ground is going to be really impractical on this now very damp planet, you realize that practicality is probably not its main purpose. You think Jade’s probably in fact really pretty, and you just don’t have a lot to compare her to. Yeah. Not your fault that comparing the prettiness of girls hasn’t exactly been a priority in your life until this point, or you’re sure you would’ve already mastered that art to perfection. Except of course for how sitting around comparing girls to each other as a hobby would make anyone a giant tool, so scratch that. The point is, it’s not weird at all how you have no idea how to feel about Jade’s potential prettiness in relation to you, and mostly you just want her to go back to hugging you, which obviously is not something you’re going to say out loud under any circumstances.

“Okay. So will it be weird if I say it’s time for us to go fuck up some frogs?”

“Yeah Dave, that would actually be pretty weird. Also we’re not supposed to fuck them up, we’re supposed to make more of them, which is almost exactly the opposite of that.”

“Fine. Let’s go make sure that some frogs fuck. Is that better?”

“Durrr yeah, sooooo much better!” She rolls here eyes. “How about if we just go back to myhouse and I tell you about the ecto machine? And then you can help me with all the frog hunting, Mr Too Cool Time Traveler? Without any kind of fucking, up or otherwise.”

“Ice cold, Harley. But sure.”

* * *

You know what’s about to happen, but not in detail. Once the fight with Jack starts, obviously you’re aware that it’s time for you to die, but you don’t fight like it. Fuck, if there’s one thing you don’t know how to do, it’s pull punches or try to end a fight quickly-

_(A knee between your shoulder blades. The roof is burning hot against your cheek. You pant, weak with thirst. Your throat is burning._

“ _The fuck was that?”_

_You don’t know how to respond. You groan, but you don’t struggle, knowing there’s no point. His weight pressing you down is actually making it really hard to draw enough of the sweltering summer air into your lungs, and you feel dizzy._

“ _I can tell when you’re not trying.” He leans forward, and now you do struggle, because you feel as if you’re going to choke to death and panic easily overrides experience. “_ _Where do you think that’ll get you in a real fight?” The world is going black around the edges, and you don’t have enough air to plead with him, explain that of course you’d never hold back in a serious battle. You let out a helpless little sound, fingers scrabbling over the merciless concrete._

“ _Don’t let me catch you pulling that shit again. Do I make myself clear?”_

_His weight leaves your back. You gasp for air, pulling it in in desperate lungfuls, choking on your desperation, hacking and coughing and resisting the urge to throw up. When you look up, the world swimming in front of your eyes, you catch him walking slowly toward the stairs. You’d expected him to already be gone, but there seems to be a weight on his shoulders, slowing him down. He’s got Cal grasped in his right hand, and he’s muttering to himself._

“ _No. Fuck. I already put_ _him right, don’t worry about it._ _Nah, I’ll… I’ll pick it up once he’s gone downstairs and had a drink. No use in pushing him until he drops.” A pause, and then his voice is so low that you can barely hear, and you’re not sure if you aren’t just imagining it. “Yeah, I know. I_ _ **know**_ _, alright? I’m sorry. Please just… please stop.”_

_All you’d wanted was to go downstairs and have a drink. It had honestly been worth losing just to get it over with and finally be able to. But you’re not going to try that again.)_

-so no matter how hopeless it is, you fight for your life. All those things you said to Terezi, about retribution, about how pissed off you were, all of it seems so far away now. Jack killed your Bro, left him bleeding out on the cold hard ground, and you can only hope that the lack of blood on the hilt of that sword meant he went quickly. He’s stabbed your friends, killed at least one version of you, and wrecked your session. You were going to make him pay... wasn’t that the plan? Even if it was futile, it was supposed to mean something to you to be able to fight him at least once, take a symbolic stab at being the hero you know you’re not. You know you’d felt something as you lay face down on the ground so that Terezi wouldn’t be able to smell your face, something to do with the reason why you couldn’t pull out that sword, because the whole symbolism of being found worthy was more than you could stomach, never mind the blood. There had been a desperate need to prove that you could do _something_ about the situation, even if in the end it turned out to mean jack shit… hadn’t there?

You can’t feel it now. All you can feel is the pounding of your heart, the ache of your limbs, the strain on your body being overcome every second by a mind that’s screaming that you have to keep fighting. It’s not about how long you can remain standing, but rather about how every second when you’re still alive is worth fighting for. Because you don’t want to hurt. You don’t want to bleed. You don’t want to feel what it’s like to die, even if it’s only temporarily. You know you’re going to have to, but you’ll be damned if you’re not going to postpone it as long as humanly possible.

...Had your Bro felt like this too? You can’t imagine he’d gone into that fight thinking he was getting out alive; he must’ve known that there were no extra lives to spare and not a chance in hell that someone who wasn’t a player could beat the final boss. But a hero fights the bad guy no matter if he can win or not, and so he did. You just wonder, when the time finally came, if he’d wished he hadn’t. If he wished he could’ve lived longer, regretted getting himself into an unwinnable showdown, wanted to keep living despite how impossible that was. You wonder if he regretted anything at all. And by wonder you mean that you wish he did, but you don’t think so.

You suppose that’s the difference, when it all comes down to it.

When Jade starts unloading her gun into Jack and he suddenly shimmers you know what’s going to happen, and despite yourself you reach for the thread of the timeline in an attempt to twist yourself out of the way, but you’re too slow. It hurts both less and more than you’d imagined. At first you feel nothing at all, like great big blows hitting your body but not alerting your nerves other than just jostling them. Then, just as you’re kind of hoping that you’ll pass out before you can feel anything at all, the pain starts. You suppose you’d expected the feeling of being stabbed only a lot worse, but this shit just _burns_. It’s like someone poking red hot sticks through your body, searing the flesh. Of course it burns, you think as you collapse forward into the cold mud. What kind of idiot are you? Did you think it’s possible propel a metal slug through the force of an explosion and then let it travel at Mach 1 without it heating up?

Jade’s voice sounds distorted as she calls out your name, and it seems to somehow happen simultaneously with her reaching your side, as if time is glitching on you. She turns you over and lifts you up in her arms, and holy fucking hell, _that_ really hurts. All your shattered bones, all those pulverized ribs and smashed breast bone and shit are having a fucking party in your torso, and every single nerve ending is invited. You open your mouth to ask her to put you back down, but all you accomplish is a hideous groan as you barf blood all down your chin. Her eyes are wide with panic, her lips unpleasantly pale, and though they’re moving you can’t make out her words at all. You try to concentrate, try to tell her it’s okay, explain what she needs to do next, but you can’t breathe and you can’t think. You close your eyes, thinking that will somehow make it easier, but when you open them again…

...you’re back on Derse’s moon. There is still blood everywhere, there’s still pain, but there’s nothing you can do. It’s up to Jade now. Due to the game’s fucked-up mechanics, it was kind of inevitable for you to be dead during your first kiss. As you stagger and almost fall, only to have Rose catch you, you wonder if that even counts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> quote from “going north” by missy higgins
> 
> (the italicized flashback involves bro using violence and making dave feel he’s about to die to punish him for pulling punches in an attempt to finish a sparring session early. bro drives home the point that pulling punches in real battles gets you killed, before letting dave go. he then walks off without resuming the sparring session, and dave overheard him arguing with cal about letting dave take a break after being punished.)


	3. Hero, Sister, Confession

_”Drink up, baby, stay up all night_

_With the things you could do, you won't but you might_

_The potential you'll be that you'll never see_

_The promises you'll only make”_

The uncoupled moon drifts silently through the thronged void, and you sit with your back to the wall under one of the windows in an effort to avoid looking outside. You’re not comfortable with the barely visible shapes slithering and roiling out there in the darkness, and would really prefer to see as little of them as possible. Their song is ever-present now, dissonant harmonies blending together with guttural hisses and distant, almost inaudible howling. Honestly, at this point you feel that blowing up might actually come as a mercy.

“So,” Rose says, lying on her back on the floor, so still that you’d thought she might be napping, “is there any particular reason why you avoided ever meeting up with John?”

You blink, feeling something in you seize up in wariness. “Avoid? The fuck are you talking about? I wasn’t avoiding shit, there just wasn’t-”

“-time?” She tilts hear head to the side and raises her eyebrows at you, clearly pleased to have fired that particular missile right into the main reactor of your argument. “We both recognize that for the downright flimsy excuse that it is. Are you really going to tell me that you spent all that time traveling back and forth across the timeline, effectively prolonging your personal game time by several days, and at no point were you able to break loose for a little while to go see your best bro? Out of all of us, you’re the one who had every opportunity to fuck around a bit and get a little socializing in while you could. So why didn’t you?”

You grit your teeth for a moment, not wanting to say anything unkind, not when the two of you have so little time left. You know this is just Rose’s way of showing concern. “Okay, but think about it logically. The best time to hang out with John would be while he was still on his planet, right? Except for a while there I was busy with my own shit, so that didn’t really leave that much time before spider troll had that stooge unwittingly god tier his way to the battlefield. And by then I already had enough of a grip on the timeline and people’s movements to know that he and I never met on LOWAS, so that kind of nixes any opportunity for a future me to travel back to then unless I wanted to create a pointless time paradox. And sure, I could probably have made my way to the battlefield if I wanted, but what with the intricate fucking timeline hoops that Terezi had me jumping through and the freestyle frog foraging, I was kept pretty fucking busy. Not to mention… look, John was looking for his dad, right? Except since I was all over the place, at some point there...”

Rose’s eyes widen slightly. “You figured out what was going to happen.” Just as slightly, her eyes narrow. “When exactly did you figure this out?”

You give her a tired look. “In relation to what, Rose? _I_ barely knew if I was a past Dave or a future Dave to y’all half the time I talked to you. That’s the problem with time travel. You end up with a timeline that makes sense from your own point of view, but there’s not actually any orderly way of matching it up with anyone else who is still going linear. I mean fuck, I feel our conversations with the trolls have provided a more poetic example of that than I could ever manage to craft. It’s like everyone else is both going so much faster than you, because they take a much shorter time to reach the end goal if you get what I mean, and at the same time they’re also moving forwards in slow motion because you’ve got so much more shit going on all at once. Shit’s exhausting.” You shrug, sliding down on the floor as well, lacing your fingers behind your head. “Besides, I wasn’t entirely certain. I just had a feeling that’s how it had to play out. But even if it was just a feeling… do you really think I could’ve looked him in the eyes and said nothing? I get that you might’ve been fooled by my cool and laid back attitude, not to mention my perfect mastery of my own emotions, but I’m not actually flat-out cold blooded. I guess what I’m saying is, trying to keep it a secret would’ve messed me up.”

She looks away, shoulders sagging as her expression seems to dissolve into an unreadable pattern of shadows and lights. “Go on,” is all she says.

“Well, I don’t know, that’s pretty much it. By the time he found out, Jack had already made a colander of my twitching carcass, I was on Derse, and he was heading off to my planet to start the Scratch.” You press your lips together. “I might’ve had some vague plan to meet him there once he arrived, but all that kind of went spinning like a firework down the garbage disposal when it turned out we were both out of extra lives and I had to try to argue with you about who was going to go off and perma-die.”

Rose snorts. “Oh, was there anyone twisting your arm about that? Since you say you _had to_ , I can only surmise that this was how you experienced the situation, although I think you’ll find that the perpetrator was in fact a self-professed cool guy performing a rather strange act of contortionism in a poorly motivated effort to strong-arm himself into martyrdom.”

“Rose.” You rub your hands over your face, careful not to knock your shades off. “Do we really have to toss that shit back on the griddle for another reheating? Because I’d say it’s just about as thoroughly cooked as any fecal matter can get. In fact it’s so done that we’ve already slapped it on bun, bit into the proverbial shit sandwich and washed it down with a beer, with plenty of time to re-digest that sucker. And now you want us to squat over the griddle, taking turns starting the process all over again, and I just don’t know if I can face it. Is it too much to ask for us to be done eating shit – at least until the time comes for us both to face our terminal shit-eating?”

She wrinkles her nose at you, but isn’t derailed by the disgusting simile like you’d half hoped she would be. “I personally feel like we’re already in the middle of a discussion we’ve had before, Dave. So since you don’t wish to immerse yourself in another bout of sandpit bickering over whose turn it really was to commit suicide, let me bring back another favorite of yours, and ask you this: Is that really the only reason? Is fidelity to the inevitable, a sort of slavish adherence bordering on devotion to what’s ‘supposed’ to happen, all that motivated you to never once seek John out? In much the same vein as not telling Jade about your upcoming death and her role in it, can you truly claim that the ultimate outcome wasn’t shaped just as much by your own reluctance as the reciprocating mechanisms of paradox space? Hasn’t it been made clear by now that the choices one is naturally predisposed to make are what both creates and maintains the integrity of the alpha timeline in the first place?”

You want to challenge her on what she means with ‘reluctance’, tell her that she doesn’t know what she’s talking about, that of course you wanted to finally meet John for real. Because it’s true. Now that it’s impossible, you’re pissed off at yourself for missing your chance. But you also know that if you do, she’ll give you a Look, and there’ll be no way of pretending like you don’t know what she’s implying by it. She’s implied it halfway to death for _years_ , both through the medium of subtle barbs and insinuations, as well as more blunt statements, jokes and wheedling. You know what she’s really asking you. You sigh.

“Look, it’s complicated.” That makes her raise her eyebrows in surprise, as if she hadn’t expected it to be quite this easy, and you hurry to cut her off before she can try to press further. “Okay, I don’t know what you think I meant by that, but I’d like you to put those eyebrows down at once, and maybe don’t whip out your notebook and pencil just yet either. Fucksake, don’t you know that you don’t shout eureka and bolt naked into the street unless you’re absolutely sure you’ve had a breakthrough? That’s what separates the bona fide genius from your everyday, run-of-the-mill streaker.”

“You know, you immediately resorting to such provocative imagery does very little to rein in my enthusiasm,” she says with a small smile. “But fine, I suppose I can be patient and play along. Why is it complicated?”

You grimace and slide your arms out from under your head, waving them vaguely in the air above you as if trying to shape a vague idea into words by physically manipulating it. “Okay, so like… This is at least tangentially relevant, so bear with me here. Did you know that while we were guided by Terezi and Vriska, they had this sort of twisted competition about who was messing with the best human guy?”

Rose makes an amused, incredulous little sound. “No, and I’m going to assume that you didn’t lend any credence to such a preposterous idea.”

“I mean, obviously not. To be honest, I was never sure how much Terezi actually gave a shit about it either. She’ll do all this coy fucking horseplay where she pretends to be really invested in pointless shit like that, but in reality she’s way too smart not to get that it doesn’t actually matter. Then again, I’m not putting it past her to be spiteful enough to still want to ‘win’, whatever winning even means. Maybe in her eyes – or I guess her nose? – it was all about whoever managed to trick their chump into making the biggest possible ass of himself. You’d think Vriska had an obvious natural advantage there with Egbert, but I ain’t so sure.” You realize that you’re dangerously close to smiling, and quickly set your face.

“I think you mentioned some kind of tangential relevance there, back when the world was a younger, sweeter place…?”

“Sweet almighty Jegus, will you chill out for half a second as I’m getting there?” You don’t know why, because honestly the last thing you need is more pressure on you, but you turn on your side so that you’re facing her. She hesitates a moment, then does the same. If you both reached out like this, you’d be able to touch each other’s hands easily. Instead you awkwardly prop your head up against your palm, using your other hand to drum out a nervous beat against the floor. “Like I said, I didn’t take that crap seriously. But maybe a dude can still look at the trajectory of another dude’s story as compared to his own and notice some… fuck it, let’s call them thematic differences. Like how the former is this incredibly pure coming of age and finding your true destiny kind of deal happening to an embarrassingly obvious modern equivalent of the humble goddamn farm lad, and the latter is… not.” You slide your fingers across the floor, and your mental record scratches and picks up somewhere else. “I know you think I had this huge hardon for the idea of going off and blowing myself up and swindling you out of the honor, but the truth is that’s not actually me.”

“No, I sort of got that. We touched on it back in the dream bubble memory, remember? Not sacrifice, but escape.”

“Okay, well, I still don’t know what you mean by that and it’s beside the point. What I mean is that’s the way the world works, whether it’s how paradox space wants it or part of the ultimate riddle or whatever. That kind of stuff comes naturally to some people, they just stumble ass first into heroic self-sacrifice and noble sentiments, and that’s just how shit is. When that kind of guy decides to do it, he doesn’t have to lie by omission to nice girls about how they’ll end up shooting him and having to snog his corpse, or haggle pointlessly with his ecto-sister about who gets to die, only to have her first pull the wool over his eyes and then quickly spin that wool into enough yarn to clock him with. Real heroes don’t get bogged down with that kind of shit, they just go out there and do it.”

Rose is frowning at you. “So you’re saying you avoided seeing John out of a sense of… inferiority? Because you thought he made a better hero than you? Dave-”

“Not exactly. I think we can both agree that in a party full of nothing but Johns with no outside guidance, even in a game as short as ours, everyone would be dead way before the reckoning. I mean holy shit, John literally went off and doomed us all by immediately dying in another timeline. And maybe in a party of Roses everyone would go off the eldritch deep end all at once, and Jades would all be napping at the worst times, and fuck, even just one Dave caused enough of a Dave inflation all on his own, imagine the pandemonium if there was more of me.” You glance at her to see if you managed to make her smile, but she’s still watching you with what you can only describe as concern, and you don’t like it much. “The point is that there has to be some sort of balance between the different elements. I get why someone like me is just as needed as John, even if my task has more to do with keeping us all on track and fucking shit up than being the hero, that’s fine. But even so, when I finally met him, I wanted to know for sure that...” What? You have no idea how to finish the sentence. You still don’t know what you were trying to prove.

“...This is about fighting Jack, isn’t it?” Rose asks, her voice carefully neutral now. “You wanted to do that before you met up with him.”

“Sure.” You slump down and rest your forehead against the cool surface of the floor. “Let’s just go with that.” It’s not the whole explanation, but it’s true you’d told yourself you could put it off until then. With the assumption, of course, that Rose would still have two lives at her disposal and it wouldn’t be a problem to leave her on her own to complete her mission. You’d fly back to your own planet and meet up with John there and- and-

You still can’t get any further than that.

“Also the thing about his dad really was the truth. Not just before he died either. I mean, for all that neither of us want to talk about it, and of course I get that you and he want to talk about it the least, that was still… it happened. And it really fucking sucked.” She doesn’t have to say anything, and you don’t have to look at her face. You know it wasn’t the right thing to say. You groan, the moisture of your breath fogging up your shades, plunging even the small section of the world you can currently see into obscurity for a moment. “See, that’s why I’m the last fucking person in the world to talk to about all that. I’ll end up saying shit like ‘it really fucking sucked’ as if that’s not the most monstrously inappropriate understatement imaginable, and it’ll only get worse from there. I just… I can’t get it. I’ll never get it.”

“Your guardian died too,” Rose says, her voice surprisingly soft.

“Yeah, but that- that was different. First of all he wasn’t just pointlessly slaughtered out of nowhere, he went _looking_ for Jack. It was something he felt he had to do, and he decided it was worth it. It’s… look, just believe me when I say it’s not the same and I’d never be able to talk about what happened with your parents the right way, okay? Even if I could’ve met John after it happened, it wouldn’t be a great idea.”

“Do you think John would’ve brought it up?”

“Maybe not. Alright, probably not. But I guess it was just another reason for me to psyche myself out of seeing him.” You don’t know how to explain how it’s also tied to the jealousy that’s been tangled up with your feelings about John and his dad for a long-ass while now, and how that’s a whole separate situation which had also made you hesitant about seeing him, even from the very start of the game. How can you explain that your best friend’s completely normal complaints about his overbearing guardian sometimes made you feel so frustrated, maybe even resentful, without edging out over some really fucking dicey territory?It all comes from a bitter and shameful little part of you which you’d rather not acknowledge, and certainly wouldn’t want to have to explain, because you don’t fully understand it yourself. But if John had found out about it… you’re not sure how you could’ve lived with that.

Rose sighs heavily, and you can hear her scooting a bit closer, but you don’t look up. “Alright, I do find myself agreeing with you. It _is_ obviously quite complicated, and I’ll concede that perhaps I was trying to simplify the issue in order to suit my own narrative.” She puts her hand next to yours, you can see it out of the corner of your eye, but she doesn’t seem to know how to bridge the half-inch between you. Taking your hand had seemed so easy for her the first time you met, but that feels like a long time ago now. “Even so, I find myself wondering… aren’t you omitting something from the story?”

Fuck, you’re so tired. “If omission was what just happened here, it would probably be because the thing I avoided saying is something I don’t want to spend whatever time I have left to live getting into… and maybe because now it doesn’t even matter anymore. I’ll never know for sure.”

“...But there is something?”

“If, Rose. I said _if_.” Your eyelids feel heavy. She seems to give up on your hand for now, and to your surprise she instead moves hers to your head, gently ruffling your hair and saying nothing. Your sister, you think, and for the first time it feels like you really mean it. There’s only you and she here. It’s almost over. “But yeah. There is.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> quote from “between the bars” by elliot smith


	4. Home, Tears, Blood, Story

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hahaaaaa okay so I thought this was going to be four chapters, very neat, but in fact the karkat part has just grown way too long to post as one chapter, so here I go. i still have one part left to finish, but I'm getting the two finished parts i've got up. sob.

_"Someone gave me wishes_

_and I wished for an embrace."_

You’re not sure what you’d expected from life on the meteor, but you know you could never have predicted what it’d really be like. It would make sense if existing in such a nebulous state between life and death started to wear on your soul after a while, and of course three years confined in the same space with mostly strangers had seemed like a daunting concept. So it’s honestly surprising when you realize that it actually isn’t that bad. The upsides should’ve been obvious, and yet somehow you suppose you were too used to the life you had before to actually anticipate how different things could be. To not have to hide away food, to not constantly have to be on edge, to have people to talk to face to face more or less whenever you crave it, to not ever go to bed hungry and aching.

Sure, managing social interactions still feels a bit like navigating the floating rock islands and rickety structures on LOHAC with a blindfold on, but the more you do it the more you realize that the worst that can happen is that you make a bit of an ass of yourself, and there are ways of sorting that out. Even if it makes you anxious, it never escalates past awkwardness and mild discomfort, never makes your pulse drum in your throat as if it might drown you, never crawls down your spine and pinches your skin like frozen needles, never forces the air from your lungs. It doesn’t leave your skin looking like a bleeding tic-tac-toe board, or like an impressionist painting in blues and purples and greens. It doesn’t sprain, tear or break. And even when accounting for the dream bubbles, you sleep better than you ever have before in your life.

You do notice, though, that Rose is getting a bit short with you when you linger around her and Kanaya for long periods of time, and while Terezi is cool to hang out with, she and Vriska are pretty fucking explicit about it when your presence is not required. That’s fair enough, you’d hate to be the obvious third wheel guy at a lesbian party anyway. If you still want company – let’s be real, you usually do – you often hang with the Mayor, but sometimes a guy finds himself jonesing for more vocal company, so you seek out Karkat too. At first just because he’s hilarious to rile up, and because it’s wild to spend time around someone who wears his feelings so openly. But after a while you realize it’s because you actually want to talk to him, that he’s surprisingly relaxing to be around, and listens to you in a way no one ever has before. You realize that you find yourself missing him when he’s not there. Somehow, without either of you really trying to make it happen, he becomes your friend. As complicated and multifaceted a title as it is, you’d even say that he becomes your best friend.

And that opens the floodgates to more firsts than any one thing in your life has before. Somehow he either changes everything, or changes you on such a fundamental level that everything ends up looking different to you now. Maybe those two things aren’t all that different.

For the first time another person cries in front of you – real tears, you mean, not happy overwhelmed tears like when you met up with Jade, or the held-back gleam in Rose’s eyes right before the bomb went off. You’re working on your music in his room as he dozes off, and you remain absorbed right until a harsh whimpering sound cuts through the beats streaming through your headphones, causing you to look up. Karkat is curled up in a cocoon-like nest of blankets, cushions and a couple of carefully bookmarked romance novels – god he hates it when you leave dog ears in his books – but while you’d normally find this sight calming, and more endearing than you’re ready to fully admit to yourself, it’s clear that something is wrong. His unruly hair is plastered to his face with cold sweat, his ears flattened against his skin, his expression twisted into something unrecognizably pitiful and helpless. His hands have balled themselves into fists so tight that his claws are digging into his flesh, and you can see tiny red beads starting to swell in a couple of places. His eyes are still closed.

You shoot into the air without bothering to sort out your legs first, alarmed, and almost strangle yourself with the wire of your headphones because you hadn’t actually remembered to remove or untangle yourself from them. You quickly yank them out and drop them, floating over to Karkat’s bed and lowering yourself lightly onto his sheets, still hovering slightly because you’re worried about the weight of your body on the mattress jostling him. Obviously you need to wake him up, but how? You’re afraid you’ll scare him, and as someone who learned to sleep restlessly while anticipating an attack, you don’t particularly want to give him a reason to see you as a threat.

You’re still dithering when his eyes suddenly snap open, and only a moment later his hand does indeed close around one of those wickedly sharp sickles of his. Without thinking you grasp his wrist and squeeze his hand, trying to force him to let go, but troll hands have a different bone structure than human hands, and it doesn’t seem to work. You don’t know what to do, so you pin his wrist against the mattress instead. Karkat lets out a terrified screeching noise and tries to twist away from you, cowering. Horrified at yourself, you quickly let go and back away, holding up your hands to show that you mean him no harm. “Hey, Karkat. Hey. _Hey_. It’s just me, man. You were having a nightmare.”

You expect him to start shouting at you, but once his wild, panicked gaze settles on your face and it seems to dawn on him that he’s safe, his whole face just crumples instead. The sickle disappears, and he curls up once more, burying his face in his hands. A moment later you can hear muffled sobs.

“Fuck...”

You drift closer once again, this time properly settling down next to him. You have no idea what to do, but you understand that you’re expected to at least try. Karkat’s narrow shoulders are heaving, uncontrollable shivers are running through his body, and he seems only barely able to breathe in between convulsive gulps and bouts of dangerously shallow hyperventilation. You put your hand cautiously on his back, slowly starting to try to rub the tension out of the unfamiliar muscle groups there, for all the good that does when his whole body seems like it’s stretched and twanging like a steel wire. “Hey,” you say again, but softly this time. Once again you half expect him to tell you to fuck off, which is stupid, because if he barely has enough air in him not to black out, you probably aren’t a priority to him in any way.

You don’t expect it when he leans into your hand, and you expect it even less when he suddenly uncoils and buries his face against your chest, clinging to you as he keeps sobbing. “I couldn’t-” he manages to force out, the words smeared and choked, barely decipherable. “I couldn’t even- Why didn’t I- I’m so- so- so _fucking_ useless...”

It doesn’t exactly take a genius to understand what this is about, even if he hasn’t talked much about it before. You’ve added together bits and pieces, from talking to Terezi after your Bro’s death, to Vriska explaining why she was keeping an eye on Gamzee, to Kanaya recounting how she came to be undead. The demise of the five – five and a half? Six? Do Sollux and Kanaya count? – out of eleven previously alive friends that had taken place right before they had all met up. Most of them victims of the violent impulses of their fellows, one slain in righteous retribution, and the last one sacrificing his life in getting the meteor to the green sun, even if he somehow turned out to not be all the way dead. Kanaya had actually died and risen again, like a very angry messiah wielding a chainsaw and a grudge. Vriska had only been saved from a likely Just end by the skin of her teeth, and more to the point by the still inexplicable brief appearance of John.

It hasn’t escaped your notice that the whole ordeal had taken a far heavier toll on Karkat than the rest of his friends, probably because he feels a lot more responsible for it. That’s pretty incredible since he and Terezi are the only two trolls on the meteor who didn’t end up with the blood of at least one friend on their hands, and it wasn’t exactly from lack of trying on Terezi’s part. As far as you can tell, Karkat had only ever tried to keep all of his friends alive, tried against impossible odds and honestly succeeded far better than could’ve been expected, until it simply wasn’t possible anymore. All three troll girls have, completely unprompted by you, credited him with how many of them managed to make it through the game without dying.

So should you tell him that? You don’t, because you know that won’t help at all. He still lost his friends, and telling someone ‘at least you tried’ is a piss-poor comfort when trying was just never going to be enough. Despite everything, he didn’t want a single one of them to die, not even the asshole who apparently went off the rails and killed his ex-girlfriend in a fit of jealousy and/or existential dread, and you suppose you can see why.

It’s not often you think about this, but in the end, you suppose that you’re all technically still kids. Really, _really_ fucked-up kids overall, especially in the case of the trolls, but kids nonetheless. The thing about scared kids who’ve been through more shit than children rightly should, kept waiting for death in the dark until a couple of them completely snapped… well the thing is that maybe that’s just deeply wrong? Maybe the world is just fucking unfair, and that’s not anyone’s fault? Sure, that doesn’t mean that they can just pull any kind of shit and expect not to have to answer for it, but that’s not exactly the same thing as deserving it. It definitely doesn’t mean that Karkat can’t mourn their passing, or miss them, or wish he could’ve saved them somehow.

You wonder if the erratic, never ceasing parade of dead friends and alt-friends and alt-selves in the dream bubbles is making it better or worse. On one hand it must at least be nice to know those you’ve lost aren’t completely gone, that they’ve still got each other and have escaped the previous horrors that haunted their lives. But the dream bubbles aren’t really for the living. The more time you spend there, the more you feel like an intruder, and meeting dead versions of yourself there only drives it home even harder. In there, you’re the one who’s temporary. In there, just about every single Dave is more ‘real’ than you, and you’re just a passing ghost from their past lives. Karkat obviously doesn’t have quite as many dead versions of himself running around, but you wonder if he feels the same. If meeting them over and over only drags out the loss of his friends and throws his failures – real and perceived alike – in his face.

It doesn’t take too long for all over this to rush through your head, leaving you with the realization that there’s nothing you can say. Nothing can fix what happened or how Karkat feels about it, and honestly, you don’t actually think he wants you to try. He’s crying because shit has been awful and he’s hurting, and he’s holding on to you because you’re his friend and you’re there. That’s really all he needs from you. So you sit there with your arms awkwardly hovering over him for a moment, before you decide fuck it, you know how to do this. You’ve trained rigorously for this moment. The next time you meet Jade you should make a point of referring to her as your hugging sensei or something stupid like that.

You wrap your arms around Karkat, leaning your head forward until your cheek is pressed against his hair. Taking inspiration from vague ideas formed through cultural osmosis, you rock him cautiously from side to side, though enough knowledge of troll social norms prevents you from making any easily misinterpreted shooshing sounds. You keep holding him until your shirt is thoroughly damp and his tears have finally run out, when all he’s capable of is a series of tired little scraping sounds, which appear to be completely involuntary. You wonder if they’re the troll version of hiccups. After a moment you ease yourself backwards onto the pile of cushions, and he goes with you without protesting, squirming around until he’s draped loosely over you with his face smushed up against your shoulder. His breathing sounds mostly fine now.

“You okay there?” you ask cautiously.

“Yeah.” His voice is even more raw than usual. He lifts his hand, you think to rub any residue tears out of his eyes, but instead ends up staring at it as if he’s expecting it to bite him.

“You sure about that?” Okay, his hand is definitely trembling. You look at it as well, and realize that after busting it up with his own claws while sleeping, he’s now managed to smear a thin layer of his own blood across his palm. “Ah, shit. You need a band-aid or something? Do we even have band-aids on this bullshit space ride? Hold on, you don’t actually seem to be bleeding any more, or at least not much. Does it hurt?”

“I- no.” His hand closes spasmodically and he gathers it to his chest, which is actually really uncomfortable while he’s still on top of you.

“No, dude, you’re digging your elbow into my fucking hip bone like that, you- fuck, do you need to hear that in your bullshit troll terminology or what? Your bractal hinge joint is digging into the skeletal structure of my thrust axis, okay? Jegus, stop squirming.”

“Those are not fucking real things and you fucking know it.” He tilts his chin up until it too is digging into your flesh, glaring at you, though you can tell there’s something upset and panicked in his gaze as well. What’s this about? His hand really wasn’t bleeding that badly, so what’s- oh.

“Is this about your blood?”

“What? What about my blood? Nothing’s about my blood, alright, it means exactly fuckall and you don’t need to talk or even think about it, okay?” His voice just rose a whole octave. Yeaaaah, it’s definitely about the blood. You sigh.

“Look, Terezi made these comments about how I wasn’t ashamed of the color of my blood and how that made me so much cooler than you practically all the time back in the game. Makes it kind of hard for a guy to not to pick up on that maybe there’s something special about your blood and that you’re all worked up about it.” He’s definitely shaking again, shoulders rising defensively until they’re touching the tips of his weird floppy ears. You cut him short before he has a chance to explode on you. “But the thing about that is, like literally everything else about the stutid hemospectrum, I don’t actually give a shit about it. Which is to say, I don’t give a shit about whatever the fuck your blood is supposed to mean or what other trolls might’ve thought about it, but I _do_ give a shit about you being upset about it right now, and considering what I know about troll social structures, I also give a shit about how it probably made your life complete ass before your planet was destroyed. So like… maybe tell me about it? That way I’ll understand better, and maybe I’ll even step on your toes slightly less concerning stuff you’re sensitive about, who knows, and you can get some of this shit off your chest. Deal?”

There’s a tense moment where you think you might have fucked up pretty bad, because Karkat looks ready to either bite your or run away. But then he slowly lets his head slump forward again, and just as slowly lets his arm uncurl from under him. “Okay,” he mutters. “Fine.”

He tells you.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> quote from "teachers" by leonard cohen


	5. Try, Revelation, Laughter, Sharing, Sincerity

_"For this moment I'm eternal_

_beyond that I do not know_

_Only this: I'm alive, as alive as anyone else"_

No matter how much he complains about them, you’re starting to notice how often Karkat wants to watch human romantic movies, and he can go on all he likes about ‘subjecting their simplistic themes to superior cross-culture critical analysis’, you’re pretty sure that he just enjoys them. They seem to fascinate him, and you don’t mind. Sure, it’s definitely not the kind of movies you’ve made a habit of watching in the past, but they’re not all terrible, and even the terrible ones are pretty funny to mock. And it’s hard not to enjoy how absolutely _enchanted_ he is by love stories, every single time. He’ll cry at the sad parts, and he’ll cry at the happy endings too, he’ll argue loudly with the characters when they make shitty decisions, he’ll nervously bite his nails in moments of tension, he’ll at least smile at the jokes, and during the extra romantic parts he goes breathlessly silent, hanging wide-eyed on every word.

You absolutely spend more time watching Karkat watching movies than you do actually watching the movies.

Of course he still wants to watch troll movies too from time to time, and you’re fine with that too, although you see it as your solemn duty to subject their themes to your human scrutiny in turn, and more to the point all the relentless goddamn riffing you’re capable of serving. Karkat complains, sure, but the thing about arguing with you about your ‘uninformed’ opinions is that it means he gets a chance to talk about his precious movies with someone, and you know that deep down he loves it. Which kind of is the point. Sure, it’s hilarious to mess with him, and seriously, some of the troll movies he hauls out are just hilariously convoluted and stupid, but it wouldn’t actually be much fun to have a go at them if you couldn’t tell that he got a kick out of it too.

Which is how you find yourself draped on your back on the backrest of the movie room couch, waving half a dorito in his face as you argue your point. “...okay no, listen, literally all he had to do was dump his first completely worthless kismesis and go full blackrom with the new guy, instead of trying to force himself into that whole bullshit ashen situation with someone he desperately wanted to bone and the fucking barista – seriously, the _barista_? She was such an obvious plot device, and let’s be real here, she just wanted those idiots out of her cafe before they hatebanged on one of the tables.”

“I mean, yeah, that’s the obvious conclusion, but this is about _storytelling_ , you absolute philistine! You can’t just let the characters have what they want without working for it. How is he supposed to figure out the true meaning of what hate means to him if he just got it all served to him on a silver nutrition platter? Would there be room for any introspection at all if he just went ‘welp, I guess I hate this guy now, problem fucking solved’? Of course not! Not to mention, if they skipped that whole plot then there’d be no fucking tension at all in the second half, the pacing would be all off, how is this hard for you to understand? Get that damn thing out of my face!”

“If they skipped that whole plot,” you shoot back, tapping him on the nose with the dorito, “the movie would’ve been a merciful half hour shorter… or they could’ve properly resolved that subplot with his moirail, because that was way more interesting and also objectively funnier. And also they were like three times hotter than everyone else in the movie, what was up with that?”

Karkat irritably snatches the dorito out of your hand and tosses it over his shoulder. “They were a famous musical artist doing a cameo. I think that storyline was cut short for budget reasons, but they couldn’t cut it out completely because they were a huge draw and the character had already been way overhyped at that point – which okay, that’s really unsatisfying and a reprehensible mismanagement of resources, but that’s completely beside the fucking point! The point is that you keep acting as if his actions were illogical and contrived, when it actually makes a lot of sense to try to stay with an established rival who you’ve already invested yourself in, especially if it’s possible to fit the unknown quantity into another quadrant. What _doesn’t_ make sense about having two quadrants full rather than completely jeopardizing the one you already have?”

“Okay, so is this quadrants or fucking pokémon? Like, is the point of just getting them all without giving a shit about who you’re shoving in there?” You pull out a new dorito from the bag, raising your eyebrows at him as you start moving it slowly toward his face.

“Don’t you dare,” he growls. “And holy shit, are my aural sponges clogged up or did I just hear a fucking human lecture _me_ about how quadrants are supposed to work? I mean fuck, sure, it’s just _my actual culture_ , but fine, _do_ tell me how you understand this better than I do. I fucking _dare_ you.” You’re about to tap his forehead with the new dorito, but he suddenly grabs your wrist and pulls himself closer. Before you realize what’s happening, his jaws snap shut and the corn chip is crushed between his teeth. Damn, those are actually pretty sharp. You blink, derailed, and he actually smirks a bit at that. “Go on.”

“It’s-” Fuck, what were you saying? “It’s not really about quadrants, though, or whether or not it makes sense, because who even cares? It’s the whole principle behind it. Like everything just has to be complicated and stupid and painful for people to understand what they feel, oh shit, here’s another plot device that’ll make everyone behaves like a douche, thank god, because the only way of ever figuring out how to do relationships right is to first be a massive prick about it in every conceivable way. Can’t just have people talking about it, that would be insane. Who ever even heard of going up to the guy you have obvious feelings for and being like hey, dude, I think maybe you and I should- should-” Karkat is suddenly watching you really intensely, and you don’t know why but it’s making you anxious. You decide to change track. “I mean, I guess maybe if there had been any tension with the previous kismesis it wouldn’t have felt so obvious, but they might as well have replaced her with one of those dancing balloon men, you know, the flaily tube dudes, and honestly that would actually have been more convincing. I mean, those things usually have at least _one_ facial expression.”

Karkat blinks, looking momentarily caught off guard and also vaguely disappointed for some reason, but he quickly snaps back into his customary state of borderline incandescence. “Okay no, fuck you, that’s just a character trope that you just don’t get, but having an aloof and icy character as a foil to a new pitch love interest is a classic example of-”

“-not requiring your actors to act? Bold move, but uh-”

“Oh you did not just-!” He’s been sitting on the sofa with his knees folded under him this whole time, but now he suddenly jumps up and makes a grab at you. You of course lean away calmly, knowing you can’t actually fall if you lean too far. Except that causes Karkat to lose his balance, subsequently leaning his full weight on the backrest, which isn’t actually aligned with the wall, and the whole sofa wobbles backwards. Karkat lets out a surprised shriek and tries to catch himself on the wall, which only makes the sofa slide further away from it, and as the troll pitches forward it topples with him. You try to catch him, but a flying sofa cushion hits you in the face as you grapple with his flailing arms, and he ends up taking you down with him.

You both land with a loud thud on the floor, buried under a pile of liberated sofa cushions, tangled up in your cape and each other’s limbs. Karkat swears, wheezing a bit as if the air was knocked out of him, but then he looks up at you and just absolutely loses his shit. He flops backwards, overcome with hoarse and breathless giggles, one arm draped over his eyes as if he’s trying shield himself from anything that’ll make him laugh harder. You reach up in confusion, and realize your hair is absolutely saturated with dorito dust and crumbles, coloring your fingers a smudgy red when you brush at it, and both you and he are covered by the carnage left behind by the upended snack bag.

You bite your lip, feeling an unmistakable sensation bubbling up in your chest, but trying your very best to hold it in. You almost manage, but then there’s a soft sound from above, and you see the Mayor peering at you from over the capsized sofa, looking concerned. Oh right, he’d fallen asleep on the floor about ten minutes into the movie. The thought of what you must look like now, and how stupid the whole sequence of events leading up to this moment had been, is absolutely too much for you to take. You give up any attempt to get to your feet and flop forward limply, thumping the floor with your hand as you shake with silent, helpless laughter. Every time you think you might manage to regain control of yourself, you look up at Karkat, and the moment your eyes meet you both lose it again. You hear the quiet, musical titter that means the Mayor is laughing too, and that just makes you laugh even harder.

You laugh so hard that it aches, so hard that you’re almost worried that you’re going to like burst some organ or just laugh yourself to the point of asphyxiation, but you still don’t even really want to stop. It’s the first time you’ve laughed like this, the first time you’ve laughed together with someone, and the first time you’ve ever seen Karkat laugh for real. There are faintly pink tears running down his cheeks, not the terrified and guilty kind this time around, and you experience a swelling sensation of pride in your chest as you finally manage to untangle yourself enough from him to roll onto the floor next to him. You make no effort to get up, though. You’re still laughing, but not as violently, watching Karkat out of the corner of your eye.

He sounds out of breath, but he’s still grinning and giggling under his breath, trying to rub his face dry with the sleeve of his shirt. You’ve never seen his face this relaxed before, never knew it was possible for him to not look even a little bit defensive, but you like it. You know it means something that he’s able to be this genuine around you, this unguarded, and you hope he knows that it means something that you can do the same. You hope he knows how special this is for you too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> quote from "koppången", swedish lyrics by py bäckman, translation by me


	6. Cut, Break, Truth, Thanks, Destination, Step

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OKAY i'm finally done. now that i've proven myself physically unable to keep it brief, maybe i should finally go back to writing my longer fics ^^; at least until the next random idea strikes.

_"But when you start your life anew,_

_does that long shadow follow you?"_

Then there’s that time he scares the shit out of you and you almost kill him.

Obviously neither of you mean for that to happen. It’s just that you once again happen to have headphones in as you’re spacing out in front of your computer, and honestly you don’t even think he was trying to creep up and scare you, he’s not much into pranks like that. But when he’s standing right next to you and is trying to get your attention and you’re still miles away, you suppose you can’t blame him for thinking it might be funny to reach out and dig a claw into your back. It’s a harmless enough thing to do. Or it should be.

For you it all happens in a blur, as in one moment you’re just trying to stop your thoughts from chasing each other into darker and darker places, your music cranked up as far as it goes to drown out the sound of metal on metal, and then something sharp digs into your skin and all thought immediately gives way to sheer terror. If you could think, maybe you’d realize that there’s nothing to be scared of. Maybe you’d remember that you’ve left all of that behind you for good, spread through the Medium in bits and pieces that used to be your life. A flat that had been a home only in the most rudimentary sense of the word, standing like a monument over a ticking, sizzling planet; a puppet that haunted your dreams, now lost; a man who had never allowed you to know him, pinned to the ground like a grotesque parody of a preserved butterfly. But you can’t think. You’ve taught yourself not to think, to just react, because hesitation means pain, means failure. That’s why you’ve got Karkat backed up against the wall behind you and your sword in your hand before you stop, and then it’s only because an instinctive part of your brain tells you that if it’s this easy, there must be a trap.

The tip of your blade halts at his throat, so close that he’s clearly trying not to breathe in an effort to stop it piercing his skin. His eyes at first are wide and terrified, but it only takes a moment for his expression to soften into concern, and that just doesn’t make sense. Shouldn’t he be angry? You look down at your arm, still pressed across his chest, your hand gripping his shoulder so hard that it shakes, your fingers twisted in the fabric of his shirt. The metallic slamming of your pulse is loud enough to make your head ring, your breathing scrapes through the air in shallow bursts, and those are the only sounds you hear apart from the faint scratching of your music in your hastily discarded headphones. Karkat slowly lifts his hand to where your sword is balanced on your arm, held steady for a thrust that never comes, and gently shoves it aside. It slips from your numb fingers and lands on the floor with a loud clang, but you barely notice. Your gaze is fixed on the spot where it would’ve pushed right through his skin and lodged in his throat if you hadn’t been able to stop yourself.

“Dave?” His voice is a lot quieter than you thought he was even capable of. “Holy fuck Dave, are you okay?”

Your mouth is empty of words, dry as a desert. Instead of trying to scrape together an answer that will convince no one, you stumble blindly away from him, your feet moving like anesthetized lumps across a floor that seems to be revolving beneath you. The back of your legs hit the table, and you grab it to support limbs that appear to have sunk into some kind of torpor in a matter of seconds. Strange, because only a moment ago they moved so flawlessly, their purpose clear, with the only minor drawback being that you can’t recall feeling them move at all. As if someone else had been holding your strings, expertly manipulating you from one stance to the next, and your blank mind had simply flowed along with your body.

A part of you twists uncomfortably, demands to know why you’re so horrified. It was just an instinctive response, and all things considered it was a sensible one. You should just play it cool, tell Karkat not to do that again, and the problem would be solved. He was raised on Alternia, for fuck’s sake, he must understand. He’s the jumpiest, most highly strung person you know. He’ll get it.

But he hadn’t fought back. You’d attacked him, and he hadn’t even tried to defend himself, as if the thought never crossed his mind. The boy who was raised to curl up and hide in the darkness during drone sweeps, who had learned to apply the word ‘mutant’ to himself while understanding that it was practically interchangeable with the word ‘culled’, hadn’t so much as raised a hand against you. You look down, half hoping to see a sickle, but you already know that his hands are empty. This time around he’d known who his attacker was, and maybe he’d trusted you far too much, because if a moment of paranoia hadn’t stayed your hand… You close your eyes and see his hand gripping yours pleadingly, gleaming metal intersecting with dull grey skin, bright red blood spilling on the floor, on your hands, from Karkat’s lips-

_( You don’t remember this, but it happened:_

_You w_ _a_ _ke up on a stone slab, which somehow manage_ s _to be cold even on a planet covered in lava, and you’re confused. Why had you been asleep?_ _Oh t_ _hat’s right, Terezi had said you’d have to sleep to be able to reach god tier, hadn’t she? You look down at your own body,_ _and see the same hideously ugly green suit_ _that_ _you’d fallen asleep in, the one Terezi had insisted you_ _keep_ _wear_ _ing_ _because it smelled like ‘refreshing yet smooth_ _kiwi_ _’, and hey, at least it was nice and soft to sleep in._ _Obviously nothing has changed._

_You feel uneasy, but try to dismiss it, telling yourself that you’re just disoriented and uncomfortable from having slept on this shitty piece of roughly hewn rock. She’s probably just messing with you, like always. So you try to contact her, and no, it’s not weird that she doesn’t reply right away, there might be a million reasons. She’s a busy girl. You can wait. She’s probably putting the finishing touches on a beautiful piece of art right now. Sure, she technically has the temporal advantage, but you can appreciate her sense of drama._

_GC: >:[_

_Okay, no, that **is** weird. Everything is weird and off, and you can’t figure out why, but there’s a strong sense of inevita bility about this scenario, something you somehow recognize even though you’re sure you’ve never felt it before. Like reading a story and suddenly understanding how it has to end. _

_There’s a crackling sound behind you, and you don’t think, you just react. There’s not even enough time to make sense of the looming dark figure, and your instant terror honestly has more to do with the sharp outline of the glasses it wears than actual recognition. You open your hand, expecting to close it around the hilt of a sword in a second, but your seconds have run out. There’s only cold metal, and blood, and darkness._

_You don’t remember this, it hasn’t happened yet, and in a sense it never will_ _:_

_Jade is dead._ _She’ll stay dead unless you can get her back to John’s evil teen grandma-mom, which theoretically should be easy, except she’s being defended by not one but two of_ _your_ _unkillable_ _godboss monsters._ _She’s behind you on her quest bed, and from the brief glimpse you had of her body as it fell it’s horribly crushed and limp,_ _battered and broken_. _That doesn’t matter, though, if you could just pick_ _her_ _up and take_ _her_ _back, but the moment you do that you open yourself up to be chased down and stabbed. You have to kill them._

 _You can’t kill them. It’s impossible. They’re too strong, too fast, fuck, you’re not even sure if you could_ _take down one of them_ _on your own_ _. Taking on two is sheer insanity, it’s not going to work_ _, but you still have to try. You weren’t there to stop_ _her from dying, you couldn’t protect her, so you’ve got to bring her back._ _You don’t have time to think, don’t have time to feel, don’t even have enough time to properly use your goddamn powers to give yourself more time, because these two are everywhere. You focus on fighting because that’s all you can do, and as the two blades pierce your body you wonder distantly if this counts as sacrifice or escape._ _What’s the difference?_

 _Where’s Rose? You wish you knew_ _that_ _she’s safe. What happened to John? You’d seen him so briefly, too briefly, and now you’ll never get to fix that._

 _There’s a_ _dull clatter_ _as your_ _sword hits_ _the ground._

_The teen version of your Bro is supposed to be somewhere out there, right? You’d been afraid of meeting him, but now you kind of wish that you’d been able to see him again. Or maybe you just wish that you didn’t have to do this alone._

_The swords pull out,_ _and it hurts so bad, but your vision is already going dark._

_Where’s Terezi? Kanaya? You know those crazy broads can look after themselves, but everything is so fucked up right now, you’re not sure if that’s going to be enough._

_Your knees hit the ground, and you barely feel it._

_And Karkat… Karkat is out there somewhere. He’d seemed fine as you zipped past a little while ago, but he never god tiered, and he’s honestly not even that good a fighter._ _In the middle of this chaos, there’s no telling what will happen to him._ _Is he even alive?_ _You wish you could have-_

_Jade’s hand is so cold against your cheek._

_You die.)_

-and when you open your eyes again, you're sitting on the floor, black spots spinning across your vision. What happened? Karkat’s hands are on your face, tilting your chin up, and you realize that he’s saying your name over and over again, clearly trying to bring you back from wherever you just went. He looks scared. You’re breathing too fast, your tongue tastes like metal, and you think maybe this is a panic attack. Karkat has them too, right? Maybe that’s why he’s still managing to hold it together.

“-just listen to me, you obtuse piece of shit, you need to breathe slower. Can you do that? For fuck’s sake, Dave, breathing properly shouldn’t cause too much mental strain, even for you.”

Even as you struggle to comply, you manage a strained little smile. Of course this is what Karkat would consider calming. You try to reply, but your effort is rewarded only with a faint croak, and Karkat shakes his head at you, visibly annoyed.

“Clean out your ridiculous shell-like human ear openings and listen, will you? Did I say talk or did I say breathe?” You manage another halting smile and try to draw in a deep, theatrical breath, but it stutters and catches audibly in your throat, like fabric snagging on a hangnail. “Pitiful, but I suppose it’s better than nothing. Try it again.”

You struggle to actually get air into your lungs, noticing that your lips and face feel weirdly numb, your skin prickles, and your forehead feels like a blackened lead weight. You can usually hold it together so much better than this, so why can’t you seem to get a grip now? You didn’t hurt Karkat. Sure it makes sense to be rattled, but you’re still not sure why something like this would make you fall apart. Terror has been part of your life for as long as you can remember, weighing down every moment with the creeping certainty that you’re only inches from the edge, only seconds away from fucking up. All you can do is keep your balance, postpone the inevitable fall by another breath, another scar.

You’ve always known implicitly that if you fail it all falls apart, that no matter how much it hurts you have to keep getting up, because the moment your strength falters you will lose everything. You grew up dreaming of black birds, of an endless maze of choices, and long before your strings got tangled up with the alpha timeline, you had already learned that not even death is allowed to stop you. It didn’t come as a surprise to find the future of humanity hanging in the balance of your decision, never surprised you that others would suffer if you fell short. That was what you’d been trained for. In the end, there’s no one else you can blame, no one who can take the responsibility off your aching shoulders. If you fail, you pay; if you lose something, you didn’t fight hard enough to keep it. Get up again. Try harder. Don’t play the hero, don’t cry, don’t lose. Fight. All you can do is fight.

It dawns on you that the sound you can hear is your own sobbing, as the ache in your chest starts coming undone and you no longer have the strength to hold it back. You’ve spent almost two years on the meteor telling yourself that it’s over, that you don’t have to go back. That’s almost two years of being wanted, of being smiled at, of hands touching you without hurting you, of never doubting that someone actually gives a shit about you. All these things you never thought you’d have, all these things you can’t quite believe that you deserve, somehow made you think that you were safe here. But it never ends. This didn’t happen because of a stupid mistake, this happened because this is who you are. You can’t undo what he did to you, you can’t remove all the loneliness and hurt because there would barely be anything left. How can you leave him behind when he made you? How do you fight someone who lives inside you now? You try to believe he’s gone, but every breath you fight for means that you’re keeping a part of him alive. He’s buried in your heart like shrapnel in an old wound, like splintered metal, like a lifetime of things left unchanged and unsaid.

How can he _fix_ it when he just went off and left you?

Why couldn’t he even try?

Karkat’s hands are still cradling your face, brushing tears out of the way, still keeping a small fraction of the world steady. There are tears in his eyes too, but he’s too focused on you to let them fall. When you lift one hand to his, brushing your fingers against his knuckles as if to test an unlikely hypothesis, his face flushes faintly red and the hand trembles. He looks like he’s considering lowering it, so you latch onto it before he can, grasping it hard enough to make him wince. He endures it, his eyes fixed on your face, his lips parted and soft but framing only silence for now. He’s waiting for you to speak. He’s clearly prepared to wait for a lot of things. But you’re not ready yet-

_(“So, I’ve got to ask… is the point of the exercise to see how far it’s possible to stretch a simple ‘no homo’? An actual relationship, a tender first kiss, marital bliss, two and a half children in the suburbs, all handily explained away by the time-honored refuge of the pitifully obtuse. Is this the Denial Olympics, and the rest of us didn’t get the memo?”_

_Rose isn’t usually this blunt. Your gaze skitters around, trying to catch the reflection off a glass or a bottle, but it appears that Vriska did in fact manage to put a stop to that bullshit. So maybe Rose is just fed up with you, then._

_You look away. “No, it’s the World Tour of the famous band None Of Your Fucking Business, playing their hit song Please Keep Your Psychoanalyzing To Yourself. Later on they’ll be trying for the the Guinness World Record in Staying Out Of Other People’s Relationships.” Your shoulders are so tense that they’re making your head throb. “Jesus Christfuck, Rose, I swear Kanaya’s influence is only making you worse. Tell her I’m impressed, will you?”_

_She sighs. “Fine. I was just checking to see if confronting you directly might make you less defensive, but I admit I didn’t have much confidence in the strategy.” She gives you a pitying look, which stings a lot more than her harsh words. “But I think you know it’s a pretty cruel thing to do. Especially to Karkat. So please, try not to do anything you’ll regret.”_

_You hate her for being right. “I’m trying,” you say curtly and leave the room.)_

-and you feel like you’re building a house of cards on water, or like you’re writing new chapters of a story you’ve never read. You wish you could kiss Karkat right now, wish you could do something to make this moment simpler, end the movie early. But you know you won’t. Once again you feel something twist inside you, something that someone left unfinished and frightened, and you’re not sure if even you will have enough time to put it right. You can’t create a moment that hasn’t arrived yet, can’t pretend to be someone else, because he would know. Will you ever kiss him? You’re not sure that healing enough to do so won’t mean that he’ll be kissing someone else entirely. Maybe one day you will fall asleep, and another Dave will finally have the guts put an end to you? Fuck, that’s really goddamn morbid. You shake your head, feeling your lungs expand and the pressure ease a little bit.

You can’t kiss him, but you know you want to. You want to kiss him. Baby steps, right? For now it’s enough if you can hold on to his hand and remember how to breathe.

You can’t tell him the story either. How would you know how to start, or harder still, how to finish? How would you explain what you can barely bring yourself to accept? That’s a first you don’t think you can share with him, he’s not the right person for it; you don’t know if there is anyone out there who is. You consider apologizing instead-

_(“ I’m sorry.”_

_You don’t say the words aloud,_ _barely move your lips, only feel the_ _staccato syllables scratch_ _up your throat as you breathe in slowly, trying not to taste the blood that saturates the air with its stench._ _You don’t think you have to worry about Terezi listening anymore, but then again your Bro can’t hear you either, so what’s the point of speaking up? After a moment of hesitation you reach out to touch his_ _hand, but quickly jerk yours back, your flesh crawling and your stomach heaving. It’s cold and slack,_ _and you know_ _for certain that_ _it’s not his anymore. None of this silent flesh belongs to him._ _H_ _e_ _abandoned it._ _He left it behind._

_Are those really going to be your last words to him? But it’s all you can think of to say. You want there to be something else, but you know you wouldn’t mean it. All he’s left you with is the knowledge that you couldn’t stop this, that you were never going to be enough. No legacy will be passed on in this place, no purpose will be dragged from this lifeless body. There is no hero here to pull the sword out of the stone. If one day one should happen to come along, someone worthy of wielding it, you will be long gone from here._

_It’s time for you to leave.)_

-but somehow you know you don’t need to. Karkat doesn’t need your apology, and he doesn’t need you to make up for anything. Loosening your grip on his hand, you feel it curl around your cheek, the tip of a claw dancing along your cheekbone. You breathe out. You have something more important to tell him.

“Thank you.”

You hear him breathe out too, a little shaky with relief, and his posture relaxes as he shifts his legs into a more comfortable position, but his hand stays where it is. “Well shit, who would’ve thought it? A human actually capable of showing well-deserved gratitude?” He grins, nudging your leg with his. “Is this it, Dave? Is this the final proof that miracles in fact aren’t complete bullshit which we’ve all been waiting for?”

Your back is awkwardly propped up against the table leg, and the back of your head hurts. Did you hit it when your legs gave out? You can’t remember. “The true miracle is obviously the friends we make along the way, which is to say that I still put up with you and vice versa. The gratitude is mutual, non-negotiable, and mostly expressed through obscure memes.” Your nose is stuffy and you sound like an idiot. His hand feels cool against your flushed, damp cheek, and without really thinking about it you move it to your forehead, leaning against it with an appreciative little grunt. His fingers brush hesitantly through your fringe, tangle loosely in strands of your slightly damp hair.

“So… what the fuck was that about?”

You’d expected the question to make you tense up again, for all the pain to come back and lodge in its accustomed place right behind your ribs. It doesn’t happen. Instead you shake your head very slightly, not wanting to disturb his hand. “Not yet,” you murmur, closing your eyes. “Please?”

You can tell that he’s watching you carefully, don’t need to see him to know he’s trying to figure out whether to push or not, and you trust him to get it right. He sighs explosively, and you smell something sweet on his breath.

“ _Fine_.” You’re disappointed when he pulls back his hand, even more so when you hear him getting to his feet. But then he gently bops you on top of your head, and you open your eyes to see an outstretched hand right in front of you. “Come on, get up. I’m not having you sit around on the floor like a useless tool when there are perfectly acceptable reclining surfaces all over this benighted fucking rock, that would be stupid. Let’s go put on a movie or something. And I think Rose managed to create something that is almost kind of like fruit juice, maybe? It’s not terrible, at least.”

“Dude,” you say as you allow him to pull you to your feet, only wobbling slightly, but he nonetheless squirms his way under your arm, “your entire species thinks minced grubs is an acceptable food group. I’m not trusting you to know terrible from week-old dick cheese, let alone something I’d actually like to consume.”

“You’re so fucking disgusting. You have no right to shit on anyone else’s food while you still eat those putrid-tasting musical sluts.”

“...pop tarts, Karkat.”

“Okay, how wasn’t that basically exactly what I said?”

You’re not ready yet, you think as he wraps his arm around your waist and pretends like he’s supporting you, even though you’re walking just fine. You’re not ready and you’re far from okay. There’s so much that’s messed up about you and your life, so much you still have no idea how to confront or resolve, and you’re starting to suspect that some things will never get better. Acknowledging what Bro did to you and how much it hurt, how nothing excuses treating you that way, that’s a small step too, but just the knowledge definitely won’t fix anything. You can tell yourself ‘he did this to me’, and maybe you can even start trying to believe that it wasn’t your fault, but knowing the problem isn’t exactly the same thing as seeing the solution. It’s just another step. But if you think of them all as first steps, maybe the way ahead won’t seem so long?

You won’t be walking alone. And for the first time ever, what you’re walking towards is more important than what you’re trying to leave behind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> quote from "pyramid" by jason webley


End file.
